Medical advancements are allowing more procedures to move to the outpatient setting, which creates growth opportunities in the ASC industry. Jason Strauss, president of Deerfield, Ill.-based Surgical Care Affiliates, told "Becker's ASC Review Podcast" that he sees a particularly favorable growth environment in a handful of specialties.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full podcast episode here.
Question: What specialties provide the greatest future opportunity in ASCs?
Jason Strauss: One of the areas that we're focused on is cardiology and vascular procedures. We've got several partnerships today, both on the ASC and the [office-based lab] side. And the reality is if you look at claims data from the various Medicare and commercial plans, roughly 98 to 99 percent of that spending is occurring in a hospital-based location.
The next that has been continuing to build and grow is total joints and spine procedures. Technology continues to evolve from a pain standpoint to make more and more patients clinically eligible to have those procedures done [in an ASC].
And the reality is there's still a tremendous amount of what I think the ASC industry would consider bread and butter procedures that are still occurring in hospital locations. [There] still is a tremendous opportunity in gastroenterology, neurology and ophthalmology.